Noah Feldman

“Taqiyya is a component of Shia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals.”— Dr. Ben Carson, interview with The Hill newspaper, Sept. 20, 2015. Carson, a neurosurgeon seeking the GOP presidential nomination, caused a stir when he declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he could not support a Muslim becoming president...Another expert on Islamic law, Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School, agreed that Carson’s comment was “very much oversimplified to the point of misrepresentation.” As Feldman put it, “taqiyya is dissimulation when one is being oppressed or tortured or having one’s views banned, a bit like Jesuit dispensation to lie under oath when your life is in danger.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The U.S. Supreme Court term that starts the first Monday in October will mark the 10th anniversary of John Roberts’s introduction as chief justice. He can celebrate by reflecting on the assertion by Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz that Roberts should never have been nominated. Cruz’s repudiation of Roberts, a fellow product of the conservative legal establishment, is just the latest confirmation of an astonishing process: The chief justice, a lifelong conservative who hasn't abandoned his views, is nevertheless being abandoned by conservatives -- without being embraced by liberals.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. If you're as cynical as I am about Europe's impulse to control migration from Arab lands, you might have the same question I did: Why don't European navies interdict the refugees at sea, and send them back to Libya or Turkey or wherever they're coming from? It might seem cruel, but after all, that's what the U.S. did with Haitian boat people in the 1990s and what Australia still does with asylum-seekers. You might think the answer is that the Europeans are just more softhearted than the Americans or Australians, but it turns out the answer isn't that simple. Behind Europe’s policy of saving refugees at sea and bringing them in for processing and asylum lies a controversial 2012 decision by the European Court of Human Rights.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. My friend Shahab Ahmed, who died Thursday night at 48, was the most brilliant and creative scholar of Islam in his generation. Master of perhaps 15 languages -- he was too modest to name a number -- Ahmed led a remarkable, fascinating life that took him from Kuala Lumpur to Cambridge and seemingly everywhere in between. He was as comfortable chatting with mujahedeen in Afghanistan (where he was pretty sure he played soccer with pre-terrorist Osama bin Laden) and madrassa teachers in rural Pakistan as he was in the seminar rooms of Princeton and Harvard. And he left behind a 600-page magnum opus, called “What Is Islam?” that is scheduled to be published in December.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s a White House visit in the offing for Ahmed Mohamed, the Sudanese-American teenager whose homemade alarm clock was taken for a bomb at school. But it seems unlikely that the White House will be rushing to make public amends for the now-abandoned prosecution of Xi Xiaoxing, the Chinese-American physics professor at Temple University who was mistakenly charged with sending secret plans for sophisticated research machinery to colleagues in China. That's unfortunate -- because targeting Chinese-American scientists for investigation as the cool war between the U.S. and China heats up is extremely dangerous.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Sometimes the name of a case says it all. Pennsylvania v. 2,447 Bottles of Wine is such an instance. After a county judge’s ruling, the state is poised to pour more than 1,300 bottles of fine wine down the drain -- all because of a misinterpretation of an obsolete, arcane law. The court got this one wrong. In fact, it doesn’t matter which approach to statutory interpretation you prefer: Justice Antonin Scalia’s textualism or Justice Stephen Breyer’s purposivism. Either way, the wine shouldn’t be wasted.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The mother who posted a video to YouTube of her baby dancing to a Prince song may not have had to take it down after all, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled Monday, because the company hadn’t considered whether the video was fair use under copyright law before ordering her to remove it. But don’t go thinking the decision was a big victory for free information or fair use or even just moms who let their babies dance to Prince.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Now that the Iran nuclear deal is all but an accomplished fact, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually agree on something: Both have made it clear that they don’t want any more engagement between the U.S. and Iran. Iranian and Israeli hardliners alike want the nuclear deal to be a one-off that doesn’t change the basic structure of regional opposition between Iran and its Shiite proxies on the one hand, and the U.S. and its alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia on the other. But moderates in the U.S. and Iran -- and possibly even Israel -- will see things differently. Many of them perceive large areas of overlapping American and Iranian interests, most notably the defeat of Islamic State and a solution to the generational humanitarian and policy debacle that is Syria.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Did George Washington add the words “so help me God” to the constitutionally prescribed oath of office when he was sworn in as president on April 30, 1789? I’ve always thought so, and when discussing Kentucky clerk Kim Davis’s misinterpretation of her oath of office last week, I wrote that the U.S. Constitution doesn't include the words but that Washington “famously added them.” Immediately I received an e-mail citing an essay that claims this widely held view was in fact a myth, unsubstantiated by contemporary historical evidence and derived from a doubtful childhood memory by Washington Irving. I read the essay, and then found counterarguments on the web and in a good old-fashioned book. So what's the truth? And why should we care, other than historical accuracy, which is always desirable and never perfectly attainable?

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. How much should you know before your baby is entered into a medical study? That complicated and heartbreaking question has been at the center of a controversy about a clinical trial that tested the effects of different oxygen levels on premature infants with extremely low birth weights. A federal judge in Alabama rejected last month the legal claims of parents whose children suffered adverse effects after participating. The court's decision was correct -- but not because the consent form given to parents was adequate for them to understand the risks, which as an ethical matter it probably wasn't.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. The federal judge who released Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk, from jail wasn't following the usual protocol: He was trying to effect a compromise on gay marriage. Ordinarily, someone jailed for disobeying a direct judicial order wouldn’t be freed unless she agreed to comply with it. Davis didn’t.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused a federal judge's direct order to issue marriage licenses, was freed from jail Tuesday. But some conservatives have questioned why she was there in the first place, comparing her stand with that of President Barack Obama, who says he won’t deport some immigrants in the U.S. without legal authority; with the noncooperation of "sanctuary city" mayors with federal immigration authorities; and with the refusal of California Governor Jerry Brown to defend Proposition 8 when it was challenged in federal court. These public officials, the conservatives point out, refused to follow the law. Yet they are not only free, but also lauded by liberals. This charge of hypocrisy requires a serious response.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Talk about mixed signals. Last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced a 300,000-man reduction in the size of the People’s Liberation Army -- a decision at least partly calculated to look like China has no aggressive intentions toward the rest of the world. Yet at almost the same time, he sent five Chinese ships into the Bering Sea near Alaska, in an unprecedented maneuver timed to coincide with the last day of President Barack Obama’s visit to the state. This sort of symbolism is pretty close to the textbook definition of muscle-flexing aggression.

Does the Constitution protect people who feel that the law requires them to act contrary to their beliefs? NPR's Linda Wertheimer speaks with Harvard law professor Noah Feldman about the Kentucky case.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What’s in an oath? That fascinating question arose as part of a crusade by Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis to seek a religious exemption from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. Before the U.S. Supreme Court put the kibosh on her claim, Davis in her legal brief argued that she understood her oath of office “to mean that, in upholding the federal and state constitutions and laws, she would not act in contradiction to the moral law of God.” Why? Because her oath included the words, “So help me God.”

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Think affirmative action is controversial in the U.S.? The American debate is nothing compared with the fight over caste-based preferences in India, where police smashed heads in the aftermath of last week's 500,000 strong anti-preference rally in Gujarat.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. What’s so special about religion? When it comes to exemptions from general laws, whether regulating gay marriage or contraception, no question is more important -- or more complicated. The federal district court in Washington answered that question Monday by saying religion is nothing special. The court held that the Department of Health and Human Services is obligated to give the same exemption to a nonreligious group that has a principled reason to deny its employees contraceptive health-care coverage that the department already gave to religious groups with analogous views. This conclusion was almost certainly correct as a matter of moral logic. But it’s far from clear that it was correct as a matter of law.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. There’s no free speech in front of the U.S. Supreme Court -- or so says the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which on Friday upheld a 1949 law that says you can’t assemble or display signs on the plaza in front of the courthouse. The decision contradicted a 2002 ruling by the same court that allowed free speech on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, just across the street from the court. It rested on a combination of architectural analysis and insistence that judges and courts should be more insulated from the public than politicians and legislators. With all due respect to the D.C. Circuit, architecture is beside the point.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman:  The battle for Baiji, site of one of Iraq’s major oil refineries, is heating up again. Since May, Islamic State fighters have been chipping away at the Iraqi government’s control. Now it seems possible that the empty city and the shuttered refinery could fall. Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi visited the battlefield this week and emphasized the site’s strategic importance to retaking Mosul. What he didn’t say was that Islamic State’s offensive on Baiji is part of its grand strategy to develop domestic sources of revenue that would help make it a functioning state, instead of a would-be state attempting to achieve legitimacy by beheadings and religious fervor.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: After the correction comes the nationalism. China's market meltdown portends a potentially dangerous rise in nationalist sentiment likely to be whipped up by leaders both in China and in the U.S. The motives on each side are slightly different: China's leaders need to shore up the legitimacy of Communist Party rule as growth slows, while Republican presidential candidates need to criticize the Democratic administration on foreign policy without mentioning the Middle East. But there’s an underlying symmetry that's highly worrisome. On both sides, nationalism is a proven strategy for generating popular support while changing the subject. On China’s side, the equation is pretty simple. The Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy doesn’t come from communism. It comes from economic growth, which is slowing. Even if the stock market’s losses don’t directly affect most Chinese, the sharp market decline is likely to be felt in the real economy.  

An op-ed by Noah Feldman: Arkansas, which is poised to erect a new Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of its state capitol, has just rejected a request by a Hindu group to erect a statue of the god Hanuman there. Constitutionally, the rejection is permissible: The U.S. Supreme Court permits the government to pick and choose what symbols it wants to project in public space. But turning down a statue of the Hindu deity with the jaw of a monkey also calls into question the constitutionality of the Ten Commandments statue -- because the government can’t endorse one religion at the expense of others. Confused? I hope so. If you aren’t, you get an A in constitutional law -- but something’s gone wrong with your logic function. The Supreme Court’s twin doctrines on government speech and endorsement of religion are in tension with each other, as the Arkansas situation shows.